Scientific Computing on the Itanium ™ Processor

Abstract

The 64-bit Intel® Itanium™ architecture is designed for high-performance scientific and enterprise computing, and the Itanium processor is itsfirst silicon implementation. Features such as extensive arithmetic support, predication, speculation, and explicit parallelism can be used to provide a sound infrastructure for supercomputing. A largenumber of high-performance computer companies are offering Itanium™-based systems, some capable of peak performance exceeding 50 GFLOPS. In this paper we give an overview of the most relevant architectural features and provide illustrations of how these features are used in both low-level and high-level support for scientific and engineering computing, including transcendental functions and linear algebra kernels.